Business News Roundup, Aug. 9

Published 4:34 pm, Monday, August 8, 2016

Lending Club’s loss widened to $81.4 million in the second quarter as the online loan venture sought to contain damage from a surprise leadership shakeup in May. On Monday, it also announced that Chief Financial Officer Carrie Dolan resigned “to pursue a new opportunity.”

The net loss compared with $4.1 million a year earlier. Loan originations rose 2 percent to $1.96 billion, the San Francisco company said. The adjusted per-share operating loss was 9 cents, missing the 3-cent loss estimated by analysts.

Lending Club named corporate controller Bradley Coleman interim CFO. Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Timothy Mayopoulos, whose resume includes stints at some of the world’s largest banks, will join the board.

Morris and newly promoted CEO Scott Sanborn are trying to restore shareholder confidence. In May, Lending Club’s founder and then-CEO, Renaud Laplanche, resigned amid an internal probe into a botched loan sale that revealed weaknesses in controls. That shook investor demand for the consumer loans the company arranges online.

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Video games

No ‘Pokémon’

at Hiroshima

It was a bit touch and go for Hiroshima officials, but the atomic bomb memorial park in the western Japanese city is now Pokémon No.

The city had asked the developer of the popular “Pokémon Go” smartphone game to remove the creatures and sites that appeared in the park by last weekend, when a solemn annual ceremony was held to mark the anniversary of the atomic bombing that killed 140,000 people in the final days of World War II.

The PokéStops and gyms, and the clumps of players that they attract, were gone by last Thursday, but the monsters that gamers try to catch were still popping up. The city sent an email inquiry to San Francisco game developer Niantic, and got a response at 1:56 a.m. Saturday, just six hours before the start of the ceremony.

Starting in 2018, all eight “Harry Potter” films and those from the spinoff series “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” will be seen on NBCUniversal stations Syfy and USA, the company announced Monday. NBC will also acquire the rights to additional Potter source material to use at its Universal theme parks, an increasingly important source of income.